Science Behind the Stories: The Sci-Fi in Marissa Meyer's Cinder

I first read Cinder, author Marissa Meyer's futuristic, sci-fi retelling of the classic Cinderella, sometime in middle school. I absolutely loved it. It reimagined a fantastical story as something technical and developed. The entire time I read it, I was picking apart the science—I wondered what was realistic, and what wasn't. 

Then I realized the book was the first installment of The Lunar Chronicles series, where each book follows another girl with a reimagined sci-fi fairytale storyline, and I was in love. The plot. The worldbuilding. The science. Everything. Consider the next couple weeks of my life booked. Literally. 

So, without further ado, and likely a couple years overdue, I present to you the first segment in my Science Behind the Story series, featuring the science behind The Lunar Chronicles #1, Cinder.

What Happens in the Book 

❗Spoilers: This segment has spoilers! If you don't want to encounter them, steer away from the ominous-looking gray boxes.

We can't particularly begin picking apart the science until we've understood the story.

I assume you're vaguely familiar with the fairytale Cinderella. Young Cinderella is subject to her wicked stepmother and stepsisters following her father's death, but ends up at a royal ball with the help of a fairy godmother. She ends up falling in love with the prince, but she must leave when the clock strikes 12—in the rush of leaving, she leaves behind her glass slipper. The prince, perfectly enchanted by this mysterious young woman, searches the entire kingdom for a girl who would fit the slipper. He ends up finding her, they fall in love, and happily ever after—all of that stuff. 

Linh Cinder surely seems to have the wicked stepmother and stepsisters—except she's a young mechanic in New Beijing, and the prince seeks her out after needing a mysterious something repaired. Instead of leaving behind a glass slipper, she leaves behind an entire cyborg leg. 

At the beginning of the book, Cinder described that she became a cyborg after sustaining injuries in the hovercraft accident that killed her parents. The surgeon implanted her with mechanical parts, which were necessary to save her life and, to an extent, improve her quality of life. Cinder, however, was looked down upon for her cyborg traits, especially by her stepmother and stepsisters, who enrolled her nonconsentually in a study to find the cure for letumosis, a plague ravaging New Beijing.

Letumosis

Retrospectively, there are numerous parallels between the letumosis plague and examples of real-world medicine—a lot that I didn't see when I first read Cinder. The first comparison I'm going to draw may not stem directly from STEM at all—rather, I'm going to take a look at the role ethics has played in shaping modern medicine. 

The study Cinder was enrolled in could most accurately be described as a clinical trial. The lead investigator, Dr. Erland, would inject his participants with tagged letumosis pathogens, and would then wait for these pathogens to take effect so that he could test his antidote. Unlike with other participants, Cinder's immune system was able to destroy all of the pathogens, meaning she walked away from the trial healthy. We later learn that this is because Cinder is actually Lunar—a separate species of moon inhabitant—who actually spread letumosis to New Beijing in the first place.

The government of New Beijing enforced a cyborg draft, conscripting cyborgs as involuntary, nonconsensual test subjects. Cyborgs were viewed as only partly human—Cinder's scan suggested that she was 36.28% cyborg and thus 36.28% not human—so the government decided that this factor could validate their completely unethical study, despite many cyborgs not surviving the experimentation. 

When looking back at the letumosis study, I realize that it has striking similarities to the Tuskegee Syphilis Study (1932-1972), in which the U.S. Public Health Service studied the progression of syphilis in Black men without informed consent. These men were told they were receiving treatment, but were deliberately denied it even after penicillin became available. Then comes the question of informed consent. Participants were lied to about the nature of the study, not informed of their diagnosis, and misled into thinking they were receiving care. Like letumosis, this study was also government-sanctioned—it continued for 40 years, with backing from multiple government levels, and CDC and other local institutions remained complicit even after ethical concerns were raised. Despite these horrors, these studies were justified for their "scientific games" and "for the greater good" to find a cure. Both studies exploited systematic inequality and dehumanization for scientific gain, utilizing marginalized groups as test subjects.

After Tuskegee was exposed in 1972, the U.S. government created the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research, which published the Belmont Report (1979), which outlined three key ethical principles:

1. Respect for Persons - informed consent & autonomy.
2. Beneficence - minimize harm, maximize benefits.
3. Justice - fair distribution of research benefits and burdens.

So, now, all research participants must be fully informed of risks, benefits, and the purpose of the study, and written consent is standard and legally required, as it should be.

Looking at Cinder, it seems that while participants thought they were informed of the purpose of the study, Dr. Erland actually had ulterior motives and wasn't interested in simply finding the cure to letumosis. He was actually looking for Lunars, like himself, and when he came upon Cinder, he discovered that she was Lunar as well. He didn't tell her this, though he did explain that she was immune to the plague. 

So we know that people like Cinder (*ahem* Lunars) in the world of The Lunar Chronicles are immune to the letumosis—but is this possible in real life?

Well, kinda.

This actually reminded me of how those with a copy of the sickle cell trait provide protection against severe malaria. Sickle cell anemia is an autosomal recessive condition where, if you carry two copies of the trait, abnormal hemoglobin causes the blood cells to form the abnormal shape of sickle. If you have only one copy, you have normally-shaped cells, but can still pass it down to your offspring. Malaria parasites invade red blood cells and require a low-oxygen environment to thrive and replicate. In individuals with sickle cell, infected red blood cells, especially under low oxygen conditions, may sickle, hindering the parasite's growth and replication. This creates an unfavorable environment for the parasite.

This is very different from letumosis—but it comes to show how genes in some groups can cause partial immunity to certain diseases. 

Cyborg Technology

We've already established that Linh Cinder is a cyborg. She has a mechanical hand and foot, a digital interface in her brain, and internal diagnostic systems. 

While this doesn't particularly make patients "cyborgs," we can see multiple instances in which patients have required mechanical limbs, more commonly known as bionic limbs or prosthetics. This is perhaps the most realistic aspect of Cinder's cyborg makeup—however, real bionic limbs still don't have completely seamless performance compared to the ones Cinder has, which makes hers more advanced than real-world science. 

Cinder also has a form of an internal computer system, capable of internet access, medical diagnostics, and real-time data analysis. When I first read Cinder, I wasn't completely sure why the doctor felt that this was necessary—after all, his main goal was keeping Cinder alive. The idea of neural integration and having brain-computer interfaces is real, with the development of concepts like Neuralink and BrainGate, but integrating them smoothly and safely for continuous use is still experimental.

To me, the most interesting aspect of Cinder's neural integration set-up is lie detection. Cinder's biometric lie detection is theoretically plausible, utilizing pulse monitoring, sweat, and microexpressions; however, real-world lie detection based on biometrics remains unreliable and easily confounded by stress or psychological variation, meaning it may not be the most accurate or useful.

The End

That leads to a conclusion in the first segment of Science Behind the Stories—stay tuned for volume 2!